User:Jj98/Portal:History of the United States/Intro

The history of the United States as covered in schools and universities typically begins with either 1492 and Columbus, or—especially in recent years—with the prehistory of the Native peoples. Officially the United States of America began as an independent nation with the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. European colonists reached the Gulf and Pacific coasts, but the largest settlements were by the English on the East Coast, starting in 1607. By the 1770s the Thirteen Colonies contained two and a half million people. They were prospering, and had developed their own political and legal systems. The British government's threat to American self-government led to war in 1775 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776. With major military and financial support from France, the Patriots won the American Revolution. In 1789 the Constitution became the basis for the United States federal government, with war hero George Washington as the first president. The young nation continued to struggle with the scope of central government and with European influence, creating the first political parties in the 1790s, and fighting a second war for independence from Britain in 1812.

U.S. territory expanded westward across the continent, brushing aside Native Americans and Mexico, and rejecting the advice of Whigs who wanted to deepen the economy rather than expand the geography. Slavery of Africans was abolished in all the Northern states by 1803, but it flourished in the Southern states because of heavy European demand for cotton. After 1820 a series of compromises postponed a showdown on the issue of slavery, but in the late 1850s the new Republican power took political control of the North and promised to stop the expansion of slavery, which implied its eventual death. The 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln triggered a crisis as eleven slave states seceded to found the Confederate States of America in 1861. The bloody American Civil War (1861–65) redefined the nation and remains the central iconic event. The South was defeated and, in the Reconstruction era, the U.S. ended slavery, extended rights to African Americans, and readmitted secessionist states with loyal governments. The national government was much stronger, and it now had the explicit duty to protect individuals. Reconstruction was never completed by the US government and left the blacks in a world of Jim Crow political, social and economic inferiority. The entire South remained poor while the North and West grew rapidly.

Thanks to an outburst of entrepreneurship in the North and the arrival of millions of immigrant workers and farmers from Europe, the U.S. became the leading industrialized power by 1900. Disgust with corruption, waste, and traditional politics stimulated the Progressive movement, 1890s–1920s, which pushed for reform in industry and politics and put into the Constitution women's suffrage and Prohibition of alcohol (the latter repealed in 1933). Initially neutral in World War I, the U.S. declared war on Germany in 1917, and funded the Allied victory. The nation refused to follow President Woodrow Wilson's leadership and never joined the League of Nations. After a prosperous decade in the 1920s the Wall Street Crash of 1929 marked the onset of the decade-long world-wide Great Depression. A political realignment expelled the Republicans from power and installed Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt and his elaborate and expensive New Deal programs for relief, recovery, and reform. Roosevelt's Democratic coalition, comprising ethnics in the north, labor unions, big-city machines, intellectuals, and the white South, dominated national politics into the 1960s. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the U.S. entered World War II alongside the Allies and helped defeat Nazi Germany in Europe and, with the detonation of newly-invented atomic bombs, Japan in Asia and the Pacific.

The Soviet Union and the U.S. emerged as opposing superpowers after the war and began the Cold War confronting indirectly in an arms race, the Space Race. U.S. policy was built around containment of the expansion of Communism. American programs to revitalize the economies of Western Europe proved successful in the late 1940s, and NATO was formed as a permanent military alliance with largely American leadership. The Korean War (1950–53) and the Vietnam war (1964–73) were fought to contain Communist expansion. Liberalism won numerous victories in the days of the New Deal and again in the mid 1960s, especially in the success of the civil rights movement. Conservatism made its comeback in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. The Cold War ended when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, leaving the U.S. the only superpower. The economy was in transition after 1970 from heavy industry (with strong labor unions) to a service economy based on high technology. International conflict returned in 2001 with the September 11 attacks and subsequent War on Terror. By 2008 the worldwide Great Recession opened an era of stagnation or slow growth.